In television post-production processing it is continually required to include film imagery into video media or broadcast TV media. To do this, it is usual for a facilities company to have suites, or rooms, of equipment dedicated to this purpose.
Such a telecine room will generally contain a dedicated telecine machine, such as an `URSA` from Rank Cintel Ltd. in Ware, UK, or a `FDL90` from Broadcast Television Systems in Germany, and a telecine controller and programmer, which may include such units as the `POGLE` from Pandora International Ltd, or the `RENAISSANCE` from Da Vinci Systems in Florida, USA.
Other units dedicated to the telecine room may include a noise reduction system, a vision mixer, and a colour correction system, such as the Pandora International Digital Colour Processor (DCP).
Such arrangements have been used for quite some time, and for pictures primarily in the Standard Definition range the arrangements are quite adequate. The term `Standard Definition` refers to television pictures having of the order of 576 active lines, and of the order of 720 active picture elements per line. Newer forms of television broadcast include High Definition, utilising pictures having of the order of 1000 lines per picture, and of the order of 1900 picture elements per line. It can also be required to store pictures in a `Digital Film` format, for the making of a second generation cinema film output. Typical resolutions for this involve in excess of 2000 lines per picture, and typically of the order of 3000 picture elements per line.
The trends towards High Definition and film resolution systems has involved a reassessment of the architectural layout of equipment in television post-production.
Because the frame rate of High Definition television is the same as that of Standard Definition, but each frame contains typically five times as much digital data, the consequent data rate is thus typically five times as high. This has led to the development of High Definition processing elements, which consist of several processing elements operating in parallel on different parts of the picture, to obtain the necessary throughput to process High Definition pictures in real time.
Pandora International has disclosed in WO 95/32582 that, because telecine machines are the most expensive single component in the arrangements described above, a change in architectural configuration can allow a telecine machine to be shared between several users.
Pandora International currently manufacture and sell the Digital Colour Processor (DCP) features of which are disclosed in GB 2 278 514.
Typically the processing power of an image processor such as a film resolution digital colour processor is due to two main features. The first of these is the extremely large input and output buffers (typically of the order of one half Gigabyte each). Secondly, there are the multiple colour processing engines (typically four engines).